3 ms·

I've been interacting quite a bit with with Microsoft people in the last couple of years. I was shocked to meet a bunch of people within Microsoft that have re

I've been interacting quite a bit with with Microsoft people in the last couple of years. I was shocked to meet a bunch of people within Microsoft that have recently migrated there from Sun. Joel Franusic, the BizSpark evangelist for Silicon Valley has roots as a php/perl/linux Admin, and has been a Super Happy Dev House organizer since the early days. They are working really hard to change Microsoft's attitude towards open source and *nix in general. They are trying to change the attitude from one of competition to that of cooperation. And, I believe that's why you see things like Microsoft joining the Apache foundation, Microsoft contributing a lot of patches to Linux, funding the port of Node.js to Windows, etc... So, perhaps the change in wording is a hall mark of a change in attitude, rather than a declaration of victory. I could be wrong. The crew at BizSpark Silicon Valley have been the biggest supporters of our Hackers & Founders tag line of the "Linux of Incubators." http://angel.co/hackers_and_founders http://angel.co/hackers_and_founders <full disclosure> Microsoft BizSpark sponsors a number of Hackers & Founders events in Silicon Valley[1]. I don't make any money from them, however. They cover the costs for some of the events that we hold to help startups and founders. </full disclosure> ref: [1] http://hackersandfounders.tv http://hackersandfounders.tv

dredmorbius 15y ago
That's all well and good. But. But: I've been hearing this for well over a decade. "Microsoft's attitude toward Linux is changing." Again and again and again and again. And then some new instance of FUD emerges, or a legal attack on a Free Software / open source advocate or company, some trumped-up performance benchmark, chairs in low-earth orbit. Whatever. The behavior has always failed to match the rhetoric. I'm sure there are people at Microsoft who like Linux and respect it a bunch. With a few tens of thousands of employees, I also suspect there are those who dislike it, hate it, and/or misunderstand it badly. As for the company as a whole, my read is that the overall attitude remains negative. I'll believe there's a lovefest for Linux after 5-10 years of non-idiotic behavior from Microsoft. As for caring: not so much anymore. Microsoft are increasingly irrelevant to the tech landscape. Not that they don't have a huge presence, but it's simiply not as significant to future development as it was ten or twenty years ago. Apple have a bigger market cap and are dominating emerging consumer markets (phones, tablets), Google are beating hard on Apple's heels and are pushing traditional enterprise tools (desktop apps, mail, calendar) into the cloud. Various cloud service providers are abstracting large server farms for many organizations. You can get your job done while only touching on Microsoft products very tangentially in more and more places. It's no longer a world of "a PC on every desktop and Microsoft Windows on every PC". Not by a long shot.
- TheCondor 15y ago
  It'll take a management change and some serious actions. Let's make no mistake, the company has been compeltely and 100% opposed to Linux for a very long time now. What exactly would it take to constitue a change of heart? Seriously? I would think they could extend patent amnesty to all Linux distributions. They could embrace the Mono project. They could acutally release some software on Linux. How about media player codecs? When they come up with something like JPEG-XR or VC1, how about an MIT or BSD or GPL licensed reference implementation? Short of porting a major application to Linux (Office?) I think a sizable contingent would never believe them. As others have mentioned, if you're building web apps, how do they even matter other than having a crappy browser that you have to code for?
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    Just one example, but the asp.net mvc source/reference implementation is available under a liberal license and plays nice with mono.
    - Nelson69 15y ago
      Mono isn't exactly killing it as the go to development platform.
    - dredmorbius 15y ago
      Microsoft aren't opposed to _all_ free software licenses. They've been rather fond of BSD licensed software from the get-go (it was used and may still appear among copyright credits in Windows). The GPL is another matter. Though in recent kernels, Microsoft have contributed more than Google have.

dredmorbius 15y ago

That's all well and good. But. But: I've been hearing this for well over a decade. "Microsoft's attitude toward Linux is changing." Again and again and again and again. And then some new instance of FUD emerges, or a legal attack on a Free Software / open source advocate or company, some trumped-up performance benchmark, chairs in low-earth orbit. Whatever. The behavior has always failed to match the rhetoric. I'm sure there are people at Microsoft who like Linux and respect it a bunch. With a few tens of thousands of employees, I also suspect there are those who dislike it, hate it, and/or misunderstand it badly. As for the company as a whole, my read is that the overall attitude remains negative. I'll believe there's a lovefest for Linux after 5-10 years of non-idiotic behavior from Microsoft. As for caring: not so much anymore. Microsoft are increasingly irrelevant to the tech landscape. Not that they don't have a huge presence, but it's simiply not as significant to future development as it was ten or twenty years ago. Apple have a bigger market cap and are dominating emerging consumer markets (phones, tablets), Google are beating hard on Apple's heels and are pushing traditional enterprise tools (desktop apps, mail, calendar) into the cloud. Various cloud service providers are abstracting large server farms for many organizations. You can get your job done while only touching on Microsoft products very tangentially in more and more places. It's no longer a world of "a PC on every desktop and Microsoft Windows on every PC". Not by a long shot.

TheCondor 15y ago
It'll take a management change and some serious actions. Let's make no mistake, the company has been compeltely and 100% opposed to Linux for a very long time now. What exactly would it take to constitue a change of heart? Seriously? I would think they could extend patent amnesty to all Linux distributions. They could embrace the Mono project. They could acutally release some software on Linux. How about media player codecs? When they come up with something like JPEG-XR or VC1, how about an MIT or BSD or GPL licensed reference implementation? Short of porting a major application to Linux (Office?) I think a sizable contingent would never believe them. As others have mentioned, if you're building web apps, how do they even matter other than having a crappy browser that you have to code for?
- tedunangst 15y ago
  Just one example, but the asp.net mvc source/reference implementation is available under a liberal license and plays nice with mono.
  - Nelson69 15y ago
    Mono isn't exactly killing it as the go to development platform.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    Microsoft aren't opposed to _all_ free software licenses. They've been rather fond of BSD licensed software from the get-go (it was used and may still appear among copyright credits in Windows). The GPL is another matter. Though in recent kernels, Microsoft have contributed more than Google have.